Spotlight

By Breana Roy

New Exhibits

Spring is officially here and with it comes new artwork and exhibitions all along the shore. Many are even open to the public. Here’s just a small selection of what’s new this month.

Ann Magnusson also has an exhibit on display at the Duluth Art Institute from April 1 to June 1, titled Personal. This acrylic piece is titled “Karen,

Hair-Work Artist (interior).” | ANN MAGNUSSON

The Johnson Heritage Post in Grand Marais will hold a new exhibit of woodblock prints by Nan Onkka, titled Northern Horizon, held April 30 to May 23. This piece is titled

“Through the Pines.” | NAN ONKKA

This earthenware piece, titled “Marked” by Robin Murphy, is part of the Clay Artists exhibit, held April 1 through May 3 at the Duluth Art Institute.

| ROBIN MURPHY

A new exhibit at the Johnson Heritage Post, titled Voices of Spring, will be held April 2-25. It features work by six women artists. This contemporary quilt piece, titled “Popsicle Garden #2” is by Mary

Mathews. | MARY MATHEWS

Adam Swanson has an exhibit on display at the Duluth Art Institute from April 1 to May 3. This acrylic piece is titled “Let’s

Get Started.” | ADAM SWANSON

This oil and acrylic piece by Tara Austin, titled “Limelight,” is part of A Warm Reset exhibit at the Joseph Nease Gallery in Duluth. The exhibition features multiple artists and is held March 26

through June 26. | TARA AUSTIN

Felted pieces from the first symbol making workshop. These pieces will be

part of three larger felted murals. | ELISE KYLLO

A modern twist to the ancient craft of felted rugs

BEHIND THE CRAFT: By Elise Kyllo

It’s a long, tangled fiber that binds my desire to felt a mural to the ancient method of felting rugs. Before wool, paint was my medium of choice, working on large walls with lots of people. I organized community murals to quickly transform spaces marked by gang graffiti, an exciting and chaotic process that brought people together. I moved to Grand Marais in 2012, where there was no graffiti and adopted wool as my new favorite artistic medium. With this shift in mediums, I accepted a slower, silent, process of creating smaller works. If you know wool, you are familiar with its time-consuming process, whether it is spinning, knitting, weaving or felting.

The story of how felting was discovered expresses this well. Supposedly, while soldiers were marching to war, they filled their sandals with sheep wool. After traveling for days, sweating and compressing the wool, they discovered they had made very durable felted wool soles. I’m sure felted wool soon became saddles, hats, rugs, until today when artists are felting shoes, wedding dresses, sculptures and possibly even murals. With many crafts, there may be short cuts or time savers, but with felting, whether small or large, it is a process of patient agitation that causes the microscopic wool fibers to permanently bond to one another. This hand work, beginning with gentle rubbing and progressing to full physical exertion, cannot be rushed.

After a full year of quietly crafting with wool and covid isolation, I am scheming to safely bring people together in exciting and chaotic creativity, like painting a mural, but using wool instead. Wool, water and our hands will replace the paints and paintbrushes, with a goal of three 4-by6-foot community-made felted murals. I wish to create an opportunity for people to gather, to be creative and to create something larger than we could do alone.

Because I am a painter, and a felter but not a rug maker, I turn to the Far East and Middle East tradition of felted rugs. Closer to home, I look to Mary Reichert, a local felter who loves to make rugs and learned traditional rug-making methods in Kyrgyzstan. In a past rug making workshop at North House Folk School with Reichert, she expressed the complexity of the symbolism often embedded in these rugs; what may look simply like patterns, is actually a living story told by the maker and becomes a blessing to the person gifted the rug. Perhaps, similar to a felted rug, the community murals were a form of storytelling, as well as a way to heal and bring beauty to a community. Similar to the painted murals, the felted murals will become a story told by the many people who participate in the making of the murals. While there’s no graffiti in Grand Marais, there is plenty to heal from after a really difficult year full of challenges and suffering, from which no one was immune.

The idea for felting murals came from a visit to my childhood neighborhood in Minneapolis destroyed by the civil unrest after the murder of George Floyd. I was utterly flattened with sadness as I witnessed so much destruction throughout the city. Feeling hopeless and helpless, I did the one thing that felt right; pull out buckets of paint and paintbrushes, gather people and paint murals.

The three felted murals will be similar to the painted murals, focused on healing, dreaming and building. Each mural filled with symbolic hearts, swallows or bees, with a word of personal importance chosen by the maker. These symbols will be made and gathered over the next four months in public workshops, online or in person. Like a traditional felted rug, a large wool base will become the home for these symbols and the living story they tell. With the help of many hands, the rugs will be felted together, a slow, physical process of gently rubbing the wool, walking on the wool, dancing on the wool and rolling the wool until it is transformed into something durable and long lasting.

After a full year of quietly crafting in isolation, Elise Kyllo is scheming to create

three 4-by-6-foot community-made felted murals. | ELISE KYLLO

Everyone will celebrate when the plywood murals in Minneapolis are taken down and businesses open up, but there is the awareness that the anger, fear, racism and divisions between people that caused the uprisings have not gone away. We continue to navigate covid, political divisions and so much more. I hope that these felted murals will become a collective voice, memory and a reminder of what challenges we have shared and survived during the last year. What we are healing from, what we are dreaming about and what we are going to change or build as we step forward.

Look for community drop-in workshops, a class at North House Folk School the last weekend in July and finally a ceremony celebrating the completion of the felted murals, the first week of August. For more felted projects, visit: worksinwool.com.

Elise Kyllo lives in Grand Marais and is a felting instructor and a Resident Artisan in the Artist Development Program at North House Folk School, where traditional craft is taught on the shore of Lake Superior.

Mike Smieja lives, creates and fires his pottery in the home that he built shortly after moving to Grand Marais in 2016. He has two brands of pottery:

Grand Marais Pottery and Zilla Pottery. | SUBMITTED

While Mike Smieja fires a lot of pottery with a more conventional electric kiln,

his true passion lies in his woodfired work. | SUBMITTED

Mike Smieja

CREATIVE SPACE: By Eric Weicht

Mike Smieja’s journey in becoming a North Shore potter has been anything but straightforward. It has been a journey full of twists and turns, highs and lows, with breakthrough moments and the occasional bump in the road. It has been, and continues to be, an adventure.

Smieja’s artistic story began in the Twin Cities, where he grew up in Minnetonka and attended Hopkins High School.

“I graduated from Hopkins high in 1992,” says Smieja. “That’s where I first learned pottery from Mel Jacobson; its where I fell in love with the craft.”

Initially, Smieja wanted to pursue a career in pottery after high school, but he was deterred from that dream by his mother who had him convinced that there was “no money in becoming an artist.”

Instead, Smieja set his sights on becoming an entrepreneur, and went on to own and operate 15 different businesses over the subsequent two decades, including a marketing firm that he owned for 10 of those years before selling it in 2007.

“After moving on from the marketing firm,” says Smieja, “I decided it was time to go back to school and take my career in a different direction, so in 2008 I attended the University of Minnesota where I double majored in agriculture and marketing.”

Smieja followed up his degree in agriculture and marketing with a masters in horticulture that he used to start the nonprofit We Can Grow—an organization focused on creating and installing affordable raised-bed gardens for low-income households.

It was during his journey with We Can Grow, fresh out of grad school, that Smieja was reconnected with the craft of pottery during a chance encounter with a friend at the Powderhorn Art Fair.

“I was actually on a date at the time,” says Smieja, “when I ran into a friend who was throwing bowls outside the park building for empty bowls. My friend asked if I wanted to throw some bowls and I was like, ‘absolutely.’”

“In hindsight,” continues Smieja, “I probably did it to show off to my date that day, but I really enjoyed the opportunity to work with clay again, it felt right. So when my friend encouraged me to take a pottery class at the Powderhorn I jumped at the opportunity.”

Despite being heavily involved with his nonprofit, Smieja began frequenting the studio at Powderhorn to make pots and explore his craft further. Shortly thereafter, he took a job working for Continental Clay in the winter when the nonprofit demanded less of his time.

“It was working at Continental Clay and making pottery that made me realize that this was what I really wanted to do,” says Smieja, “so after buying my own kiln and wheel I became a full-time potter.”

Smieja started his career as a potter living and working in Northeast Minneapolis. However, all of that changed in 2015 with the passing of his father and the resulting decision by his mother to sell their family cabin in Grand Marais.

“I had been spending a lot of my time each summer in Grand Marais, living at my family’s cabin and selling my work at the farmers market” says Smieja, “so I was devastated when my mom told me that she planned on selling the place.”

“I couldn’t afford to live both in Grand Marais and Northeast [Minneapolis],” continues Smieja, “so I decided to make the move north and start a life on the Shore.”

Today, Smieja lives, creates and fires his pottery in the home that he built shortly after moving to Grand Marais in 2016. He has two brands of pottery—Grand Marais Pottery and Zilla Pottery—both of which you can check out on their respective Facebook pages.

“Grand Marais Pottery,” says Smieja, “focuses on pieces that are functional, affordable, and that are mostly electric fired. I like to refer to it as ‘everyday use pottery for the table.’”

“Zilla on the other hand,” continues Smieja, “is where I display and promote all of my woodfired, more sculptural pieces. There are still a lot of functional pieces there, too, but it has a completely different feel than Grand Marais Pottery, it’s dark and gloomy.”

While Smieja fires a lot of his pottery with a more conventional electric kiln, his true passion lies in his wood-fired work. He plans on building two new kilns this summer—a gas and soda kiln and a woodfired kiln—to better explore this avenue of his work.

“I am proud of all of my work,” says Smieja, “but wood-fired pottery is my passion.”

“It’s way more labor intensive, a large percentage of your pieces don’t survive the process, and not everybody likes the aesthetic,” continues Smieja, “but people who like wood-fired pottery, really like wood-fired pottery.”

You can find Smieja’s work at a number of Grand Marais retailers, including Joy & Company, the Betsy Bowen Gallery, Yellow Bird Fine Art, Eight Broadway Art Gallery, and Mike’s Holiday Stationstore.

Smieja will also be selling his work at the Cook County Makers Market this upcoming summer. Information on the Makers Market can be found by checking out the Cook County Makers Cooperative Facebook page.